Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  “Your wife’s tapestry might be simpler. It depends on what you tell me about her, what’s in her closet and jewelry box.”

  “And I would do with it what?”

  “It’s a work of art. It hangs on the wall. You look at it and remember. If it were me, I’d light a candle in front of it.”

  Mr. Lipschitz fingers one of the pearls.

  “It’s good you’re doing that,” she says. “They get dull if no one touches them. The oil on your fingers makes them glow. Did your wife wear pearls?”

  He pulls his hand back.

  “A Yahrzeit candle you light once a year, Miss Royal.”

  Lighting a candle once a year, that’s nothing. When they dug Cath up after two and a half weeks and found her body still resilient, the nuns took her home to the cloister, cleaned her up, posed her in a chair, and lit candles at her feet. Five hundred years of nuns lighting maybe a million votives—that’s devotion. Not this Yahrzeit thing.

  “Or you can just look at it and remember her,” she says. She needs a cigarette. She needs a sandwich. She needs a shower with fluffy white towels. “Do you want to see photos of other work?”

  “What I want.” He takes a seat at the head of the table. “I want something beautiful like this to give our daughter. Something filled with Eleanor.”

  It sounds like a yes—she’s hired, right? She’s sure she’s hired. Cath, I owe you majorly. Maybe it’s why he wore the suit: to meet the artist, to seal the deal. Around her the floorboards gleam darkly, framing ornate rugs.

  “Mr. Lipschitz,” she says. “I forgot to eat breakfast.”

  “Who forgets to eat?” He picks up a little bell by a crystal candlestick and rings it, and soon after inquiring what she might bring, a woman in white sets down a tray holding a sandwich and milk in a delicate glass. She looks like a nurse. Rainey almost faints with pleasure.

  “Thank you,” she says, “for trusting me with your wife’s things. I promise you won’t—”

  He puts his hand up. “I get it already. Eat. What do you need from me, to do this thing?”

  The sandwich is roast beef with thinly sliced cucumber. The bread has no crust. It is divine.

  “I need to choose my own fabrics and objects, though I’ll never use anything you want to save.” She waits. “That includes some jewelry,” she says, and waits some more. “And I prefer to do the work in your apartment. If you can accommodate me.” She does not yet say feed me. She does not yet say live in.

  He rises like someone presiding. He’s in good shape for an old man. No gut, and no cane when he doesn’t feel like it. “Miss Royal,” he says. “Five hundred dollars I understand, but Vonnie Gardner let you work in her apartment?”

  “Actually, she let me stay there. You’d be amazed how much that helps.” It was, in fact, incredibly peaceful at Vonnie Gardner’s, like a hotel room where you had to behave. She waits to see if Mrs. Gardner ever mentioned that in the third week she caught Rainey hanging halfway out the bathroom window smoking a joint, which Rainey persuaded her was an herbal cigarette. Mrs. Gardner made her leave the spare bedroom, though she let her keep working days at the kitchen table.

  “Where are the parents?” says Mr. Lipschitz.

  Where are they how, she wants to ask: emotionally, geographically, sexually, what? She knows how to smile and talk at the same time, and she does that now. “May I have another glass of milk?” she says.

  He rings the bell again, and the woman in white, whose hair, Rainey now sees, is captured in a net that is nearly invisible, inquires and returns with the glass, which is so thin Rainey is afraid to hold it. When she’s finished, Mr. Lipschitz leads her through the kitchen to a small white room, simple and scrubbed clean. Without sin—Cath would have loved it. Twin bed, white headboard. A small white bureau. One window facing a brown brick wall. Serene and slightly shabby like the barren rooms once meant for staff and now inhabited by acolytes at the top of the West Tenth Street townhouse.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Beautiful,” says Mr. Lipschitz. “Tell that to the maid. The maid would rather live in Queens.”

  The walk to the next bedroom takes them past closed doors and old photographs and bookshelves and art. The hallway seems to keep unrolling. Rainey waits for him to stop, to turn slowly around. Sometimes, after standing too close, men remember the shine on her skin; they smell the tea-rose oil, and it drives them mad. And she wants to make them feel these things, and she wants to hold them off. It’s a delicate balance. It’s a constant calibration.

  But Mr. Lipschitz does not turn to her until they arrive at a large, square bedroom, with windows full of park and sky. He steps back so she can enter alone. The walls are upholstered in cornflower-blue silk—she touches it, walking in—patterned with swallows and leaves. Underfoot is a blue rug she wants to curl her toes into, and the bed has a blue silk canopy, too, gathered and radiating out from the center. Rainey is doing a different kind of calibration now. She is thinking yardage. She is thinking the fabric and workmanship on the canopy alone could have bought her a year of art school. She is thinking Mr. Lipschitz should adopt her.

  “Is this where your wife slept?”

  “You wanted to see her things, I’m showing you her things.”

  “What I meant was,” and she strokes the padded wall. “If she slept surrounded by this fabric, I wouldn’t mind incorporating some. If you had extra somewhere.”

  He shrugs. She lets it go.

  On the bureau is a black-and-white photo, the old kind that’s nearly sepia, of Mrs. Lipschitz: dark eyed and with a generous mouth, from about a million years ago. “Boy,” says Rainey. “She was gorgeous.” He looks at her oddly. It’s hard to miss. “May I open the bureau?”

  “Suit yourself.” He watches from the doorway, holding his ebony cane.

  She’s made eight of these tapestries for clients. She evokes the dead through fabric and bits of jewelry, and she is good at distilling the heart of a person to a tight and complex pattern. The people who hire her are old, and some have aides or furs or wheelchairs or little dogs. She can’t understand what it feels like to be widowed, and they can’t understand her work till it’s done.

  Five hundred dollars for two months’ work sounds like a lot of money, but it never lasts.

  Saint Cath, please guide my eyes, she prays, and keep my hands from stealing. She has to pray her prayer, or things from good people end up in her pack, and she hates that about herself.

  In the first drawer she finds two old, skinny watches with little square faces. One has diamonds embedded: she won’t ask for that, but watch faces are highly desirable, detached from their bands—they can always be reset if the owner has regrets. She puts the watches on the bed in their little white box. She rubs her fingers over vintage slips frothing with lace and an entire drawer of silk scarves in zinnia colors, as if packets of seeds had burst into bloom in the dark.

  Mr. Lipschitz moves into the room. He looks like a crow, perched on a dressing-table chair.

  “May I?” She waits for his shrug of permission and opens the closet. It’s almost a room, for heaven’s sake, with a tiny chandelier and rods hung one above the other. The clothes are arranged by color like a formal garden.

  She turns to him with a broad smile. He makes a spreading gesture with one hand. Take what you like.

  Mrs. Lipschitz left the planet without her black wide-brimmed hat, which might yield three speckled feathers and a cutting of felt. She abandoned a black velvet riding jacket and a cream bouclé suit. She gave up a trove of cashmere sweaters, which Rainey raids for their mossy texture, and blouses in fabrics that will swoon to her shears: challis, Egyptian cotton, silk charmeuse.

  Rainey steps out with her arms loaded up. Mr. Lipschitz is gone. She lays the clothes on the bed and looks at Eleanor Lipschitz’s blue jewelry box. It has a key sticking out. Jewelry is sensitive. Better to handle it in front of people. She checks both ways down the carpeted hall. “Mr. Lipschitz?”

&nb
sp; She runs her hand over the box.

  No one’s ever left her alone with jewelry. Mrs. Gardner sat down with her husband’s cuff links, many of them gold, asked worried questions about how Rainey planned to use them, wept, handed a few pairs over, and seized them back. She could not relinquish them till she’d talked awhile. Now twelve cuff links wink from Leonard Gardner’s tapestry like stars in a stained-glass sky.

  “Mr. Lipschitz?”

  She opens the box, standing to one side so that everything she does is visible from the doorway, and begins laying out the contents around the photo of Mrs. Lipschitz.

  Of course there are pearls. With women there are always pearls. But Eleanor Lipschitz owned two strands more different than Rainey has ever seen.

  For an Eleanor of propriety, a double strand of white Cartier pearls lies crisply in a red silk case.

  For a darker, perhaps an artistic, Eleanor, a long string of heavy, misshapen black pearls snakes and clicks in a gray suede bag.

  Was she one person at night, and one by day? Rainey covets both necklaces. He will have to sacrifice them. Or parts, at least: Rainey can take a handful of pearls, and the rest can be restrung. This daughter of his may want everything for herself, but the tapestry will not be honest without both Eleanors.

  Still waiting for Mr. Lipschitz, she folds the clothes from the closet and arranges everything by color on the bed, the black pearls snaking across an apricot sweater and the white pearls glowing against rose. She wonders if her job has already started and what she will cut into first. She loves her scissors. She has a pair of French sewing scissors that cost almost twenty dollars, and a pair of adjustable couturier shears that can cut through multiple layers of fabric and would have cost nearly fifty dollars if she hadn’t slipped them into her purse and run.

  No one comes, not even the lady in the white dress.

  She picks up the riding jacket and holds it up to herself in the mirror. It is beautifully lined and constructed. It makes her hungry all over again.

  “Eleanor.” She tastes the name. If she says it fast, it sounds prim, like the white pearls, but rolled in the mouth it is sensual, brooding, like the black. She takes a longer look at the photograph. In the picture Mrs. Lipschitz looks about eighteen. She looks, in fact, much like Rainey herself would look if it were the sepia age, not 1977. No wonder he stared at me that way, she thinks. The young Mrs. Lipschitz has the same straight dark hair and narrow face, the same chiseled eyes that might be half Chinese. Her eyebrows are high and arched, as if faintly surprised, and her gaze is intensely focused on something seen only by her. This was not a chick to go all soft for a portrait. She is sexy, despite the high-buttoned white blouse, and she seems to sense her own powers. This gives rise to a familiar feeling that Rainey finds sustaining.

  I know her. Black-pearl Eleanor. I can make her tapestry. The hall is still empty. She slips the riding jacket over her hand-painted T-shirt and stands before the full-length mirror. Even with Converse on, she looks sharp.

  “Eleanor.” She rolls the name in her mouth, unties her scarf, brushes her still-damp hair with Eleanor’s hairbrush, and puts on the feathered hat. Très glam. She works off her sneakers and slips her bare feet into Chanel pumps, the exact kind that Lala wore.

  Whatever you like. That’s what his gesture meant. She holds the black pearls to her neck.

  If she were Eleanor, she would wear the Cartier pearls on her wedding day. She would marry a lean young man named Allen who had the world’s ugliest last name, but it would be okay because he wanted to protect and cherish her. He would not make her feel small by quoting Shakespeare in a snide and belittling way like her father does, which seems a wrongful use of art anyway, and when he felt lust it would be in—oh, what does she mean? Context. It would not just be that lupine thing. A few years after the wedding, when she falls for the black pearls on a Tahitian vacation, he will hesitate and say, You’re not serious, Eleanor? They’re full of lumps, and he will wonder who, deep inside, his white-pearl wife really is to be moved near tears by a strand of what look to him like a bunch of dark, fat, shimmering beans. It will give him a left-out twinge he can never name and never forget. But being Allen Lipschitz, he spends the thousand dollars. To protect and cherish.

  The sensation around Rainey’s neck is cool and satisfying. Her neck belongs to her now; that’s for sure. The parts of her body meet at lines as clear as the boundaries on gas-station maps.

  From the doorway he speaks low as if not to startle her. “Don’t take them off.”

  Startled, she struggles with the hat and pearls. “I’ve never—I’m not—” And it’s true, she’s never played dress-up before, and she’s not stealing anything right now, and these seem like ridiculous things to have to say.

  “I mean it,” he says. “Show me.”

  She lowers the necklace and picks the hat up off the bed. “Don’t be mad. Her things are so beautiful.”

  He looks at the photo and back at her, a little wry. “There is a resemblance.”

  “I know,” Rainey says slowly. “That’s why I did it.” It’s a small lie, but if she keeps going, it might become the truth. “I thought if I could see her in the mirror, if I could feel like her, it would help me work. Really, I’m sorry.”

  “The profile. Let me see.”

  She makes a quarter turn. Mr. Lipschitz stays where he is. Of course if he comes any closer, the mirage might vanish.

  “The skirt is wrong.”

  “Wow,” said Rainey. “I know. Are you saying you want me to—you won’t flip out?”

  “Also the shirt. Fix it. If you will.”

  She takes a sharp breath. “Okay,” she sings, and steps into the walk-in closet, pulling the door behind her.

  Eleanor had lined her closet with white silks at one end, black at the other; peach sweaters here, and scarlet there. It would have been easy to dress in the morning if you woke each day knowing who you were. Rainey can’t imagine such confidence. She wakes each day having to harden a new shiny case around a grain of sand. Today she will be Eleanor of the dark hands, see how old Mr. Lipschitz reacts. She steps into a slim black skirt and puts on a rose silk blouse unbuttoned to here. The black pearls she slips inside the open collar, so he’ll glimpse them, rolling tidelike in and over her bust, every time she moves. She changes the Chanel shoes for a pair with higher heels.

  You’re dressing for games, she warns herself. But games seem to be her particular gift, games and the art. She never asked for any of it.

  Rainey steps out, gives him a bright smile calibrated to lightly engage, and confronts the mirror. She really does look like the woman in the picture, though the woman in the picture wears her good-girl blouse. Suddenly Rainey feels entitled to ask for things. She turns to Mr. Lipschitz.

  His gaze sweeps up and down her body, but to her surprise it lingers on her face. He seems to be searching for something. She can almost feel his throat constrict.

  “The hair is wrong,” he finally says. “Can you pin it?”

  She hopes he isn’t forgetting about the tapestry and the five hundred dollars, but this is interesting. Presumably this Eleanor had a normal mother who braided her hair and tucked her in at night. Presumably this Eleanor never felt like her father was smiling at her through her clothes. She stands straight so he can see her figure—it’s clear from the photo that Eleanor Lipschitz had that happening, too—and braids the damp strands slowly, planning to twine them around and coil them up. Mr. Lipschitz consumes the small movements of her fingers. She bets he loved watching these little rituals.

  She doesn’t mean to talk, but it comes out. “My mother used to braid my hair.” This is true—she remembers slim, quick hands working behind her, and her mother’s thin soprano—but it is also true that Linda hated the detangling that came first and finally abdicated the whole post-bath scene, which then fell to the solicitous Gordy. He would put down his trumpet as if there were no job more important than combing the wet hair of a little girl, inch by tang
led inch.

  After which he would smooth the hair down her back again and again with his fingers before the braiding could begin.

  A tiny sardonic laugh escapes her nose.

  She better watch it; she might break the spell.

  “Will you put on the watch, please, Miss Royal? No—the diamond watch.”

  The watch glitters like it wants to get Rainey in trouble. Her grandmother Lala once had a watch like this. Her father probably sent it to Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, with the chandeliers.

  “Is it too much”—Mr. Lipschitz sounds like he has a piece of cracker in his throat—“to ask you to sit in that chair and look out the window?”

  Is it too much? Is it too much? To sit at a window, like Eleanor, who got to keep her blue room? She takes her seat in a blue armchair, leans forward, and looks down at Central Park. She watches a lady steer a baby carriage into a playground with pyramids and stop at a green bench. Mr. Lipschitz lowers himself onto the edge of the bed. Rainey feels herself studied, though not in the way she is used to. Under his eye she feels like an object of great beauty. She senses rather than sees his gaze stop at her glittering wrist.

  “A wedding gift,” he says.

  It seems better not to speak. A faint scent clings to the rose silk blouse. She leans back as she thinks Eleanor might have, arranging herself for a photographer, and fingers the dark pearls as if her mind were elsewhere. She knows her bust is stunning, and she knows she has this in common with Eleanor. Once she glances at Mr. Lipschitz—Allen—and quickly away. It is an intimate act, the way he’s staring at her. Or maybe he is staring past her, at the edges of her, to blur the image so the similarities sharpen.

  Finally he says, “Use anything you want except the jewelry and watches. They are my daughter’s. I’ll talk to her. The maid will give you a key.”

  With help from his cane, he stands. But instead of leaving, he sets the cane on the bed. His palms turn toward her, helpless. Around them the room has deepened almost to sapphire. She feels a curious desire to slip the black pearls back into their dark suede bag and clasp the white strands around her neck instead.